Lectionary Commentaries for March 16, 2025
Second Sunday in Lent

The first thing to understand is that Jerusalem was the center of the world. The center of the world was in the Temple, which was in Jerusalem, and the precise center was the Holy of Holies. If something is holy, it is uncanny; it takes your breath away. Things that are holy, to echo Rudolf Otto, are “wholly other.” Or even “Wholly Other.” 

And that fits the Holy of Holies well. In the middle of a city full of clamor, the Holy of Holies was a dim, quiet place. Empty. Silent. The Holy of Holies (as sketched by Shaye Cohen) was the place where God’s finger touched the wild, chaotic world and held it still. It was a place that stood silent and empty through the year, except for the rare occasion on which a designated priest would enter the Holy of Holies (Yom Kippur), because a place of such catastrophic importance was not to be trifled with. 

According to some ancient texts, the priest would enter that Wholly Other space, carry out ritual acts to bring the world back into balance, and then emerge and speak the Divine Name to the waiting crowd. According to the rabbis, the unpronounceable Divine Name is linked to the mercy attribute of God, as well as to the word God spoke to create the world. So that would imply that when the priest emerged from the Holy of Holies, he would recreate the world by naming the God Whose Name Is Mercy. 

In the middle of the clamor of Jerusalem, this juxtaposition of quiet and clamor is essential to this scene. 

This juxtaposition leads to the second thing to watch for: the way Jesus speaks about Jerusalem. Jerusalem kills the prophets. That is not all that Jerusalem does, but Christians who only know Jerusalem from church might not know that. They may well imagine that Jesus is setting up a basic conflict between a religion centered on Jerusalem and one centered on the Messiah; between organized, formalized, entrenched religion and the freedom of the Christian. They may even imagine that this way of understanding saves them from anti-Semitic or anti-Judaic interpretation. 

I hear in this a theology that remakes Jesus into a modern Christian, one who is not tied to a place, to a Temple, or to a priesthood whose job it was to bring the world back into balance. But in Luke’s story, Jesus comes from a family that goes up to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage festivals every year, “as usual.” Unless you remember and honor the sacredness of the place for Jesus, his words sound like a typical, spiritual, religious rejection of what 19th-century German scholarship often called “spaetjudaismos”: “late Judaism.” The 20th century showed us how such a theology turns out. 

Remember that Jesus is not like you. He is a Jew of the first century, and Jerusalem is, for him, the center of the world. When he says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he is grieving for a city that he loves. When Luke gives him this line to speak in the story as it now stands, Luke is grieving for the city that was destroyed in 70 CE when Rome crushed the First Jewish Revolt. Century is overlaid with other centuries, era with era, and the history of the city to which Jesus is headed in Luke’s story is complex. That complexity can be felt in the tangled juxtapositions of this scene. 

And finally, watch out for the Pharisees, not because they are representatives of a rejected formalized religion, but because the Pharisees in this scene are protecting Jesus. “Look out,” they warn, “Herod is planning to kill you.” 

Interpreters sometimes imagine that they knew this because they were in the room when Herod was hatching the assassination plot. They were not. The Pharisees were not (at least not in the main) collaborators with Rome or with Roman stooges like Herod. The Sadducees collaborated, certainly because Rome forced them to, and also surely because it was to their economic advantage to do so. But not the Pharisees. They generally held themselves separate from Roman culture. They extended the holiness of the Holy of Holies to even Jewish dinner tables because they recognized the danger posed by Roman chaos and violence. 

And they warn Jesus about Herod. Jesus probably does not really need to be warned. He already knows that Herod is a fox, a sneaking predator. But their act of protection is an act of allyship, and forgetting that leads to a serious misunderstanding of the complexity of this scene and of Luke’s entire story. 

At the beginning of the story, John the Baptist finds observant Jews everywhere he looks: Even soldiers and tax collectors come out to join his movement to prepare for the world to be turned right-side-up. Jesus is shown by Luke to have the same experience. Zacchaeus already gives half of his income to the poor. And at the end of the story Jesus is murdered between two bandits. In Mark’s story, both bandits ridicule him. In Luke’s story one of them honors him. And the centurion in charge of the murder declares him innocent. And in the scene for this Sunday, Pharisees emerge as allies and protectors of the Messiah. 

“After you go,” says Jesus, “tell that fox I’m a little busy right now.” The scene plays best if the allies laugh. “Okay, we’ll do that very thing,” they say, “as soon as we see Old Foxy Pants. Which will be, ummm, never.” 

When Jesus then laments over the fall of Jerusalem, the allies join him. The Pharisees loved the city at the center of the world as much as Jesus did, and they hated what Rome and the collaborationist Sadducees had made of it. They seem to have been listening at the beginning of chapter 13 when Jesus talked about Pilate’s murder of some Galileans, mingling their blood with their sacrifices. 

The Messiah has more allies than you might imagine. So do you. Recognizing that is how you prepare to welcome the one coming in the Name of the God Whose Name Is Mercy.

There are few texts in the Bible as odd as Genesis 15. The narrative comes to us in a dream-like state as Abram encounters God in a mystical vision. In the vision (or in real life after the vision—it’s ambiguous) Abram performs a strange, bloody ritual, and he witnesses a self-propelled pot of fire and smoke moving through the gauntlet of carcasses. What?!

Right in the middle of all this strangeness, the narrator utters the key line: “[Abram] believed the LORD, and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). This is the declaration seized upon by the apostle Paul in Romans 4 to make his case that God’s salvation is based on “faith” rather than “works.” Despite Paul’s clarity, however, the sentence itself perplexes. What does it mean to “reckon” something? And what is “righteousness” in Abram’s context?

Where did this vision come from?

As with most texts, context is key. Genesis 15 comes on the heels of a military campaign led by Abram—a special-forces rescue of his nephew Lot. Following the successful extraction of Lot and the routing of his captors, Abram had a cultural right to acquire the spoils of victory. But instead, Abram refuses spoils so that God alone can be credited for his wealth (Genesis 14:22–24).

It’s “after these things” (Genesis 15:1) that God approaches Abram in a vision and declares, “I am your shield”—in other words, God affirms Abram’s dependence on God for military and financial success. But what good is wealth to Abram if he has no offspring to inherit it? Remember, our world is generally more individualistic than the world of ancient Israel. For them, the only wealth that mattered was the kind that could stay with the family in perpetuity. Without children, Abram asks God to explain why he should trust in God as his “shield.” 

Reckoning as righteousness

In response, God turns Abram’s attention to the stars and promises that his offspring will be just as numerous. Abram believes God’s promise, and God “reckons” it to him as “righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). “Reckon” is an old-fashioned word that means something like “to calculate.” When someone acts recklessly (in other words, without reckoning), they have failed to calculate the consequences of their actions. 

The Hebrew word ḥashav has much the same sense; it is a term often used for calculating the appropriate rate of exchange between money, goods, et cetera. Ḥashav fits well with God’s invitation for Abram to “count” the stars (a different word, safar, but also a mathematical term). Abram calculated God’s promise and trusted; and God calculated Abram’s belief as equivalent to “righteousness.”

Righteousness, tsedaqah, in this context is not an abstract moral goodness. It is a relational term. Righteousness is “doing right by” your end of a relationship. When Abram believed God’s promise, God considered it an act of faithful loyalty. Abram’s trust, taking God at their word, was his way of being a good friend to God—and God responds by reaffirming the divine intention to give Abram the land of Canaan as his ancestral inheritance (Genesis 15:7).

Faith and doubt

Ironically, Abram’s gut reaction to God’s lavish promises is … doubt! Many readers zero in on Abram’s powerful expression of faith in verse 6 and completely miss his equally passionate doubt in verse 8. Preachers will do well to help their congregations put these pieces together. Most of us who trust God, if we are honest, also experience doubt and need reassurance. For Abram, these two realities coexist, and the expression of his doubt does not cancel out his “righteous” faith.

Abram believes God’s promise but does not understand it. Abram’s response (“How am I to know?”) is perhaps echoed in the virgin Mary’s response when she is told that she will become pregnant with the Messiah: “How can this be … ?” (Luke 1:24). And when a father brought his troubled son to Jesus for healing: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). Belief is one thing; knowledge is another. In Hebrew, the verb “to know,” yada‘, almost always has a sense of experiential knowing—not just head-knowledge. In asking to “know” that God will come through, Abram is asking God for an experience, something tangible, so he can fuel his trust with knowledge.

God does not censure Abram’s doubt. Rather, God is ready to give him the experiential knowledge he needs. God invites Abram to prepare a covenant-making ceremony. This is the bloody preparation of several carcasses, bisected and arranged in a kind of gauntlet. While this is strange to us moderns, this scenario would have been recognizable to ancient audiences. Such ceremonies were sometimes part of treaty-making between political leaders. When the two covenanting parties passed between the bloody pieces, it solemnified their oaths toward each other—essentially invoking a death curse if either party proves unfaithful.

Remarkably, Abram witnessed God (manifested as smoke and fire) passing alone through the gauntlet! God unilaterally bound Godself to the promise made to Abram, upon pain of death. This was the tangible experience Abram needed. Notice how much God required Abram to be involved in this process: finding, slaughtering, and arranging the animals, shooing away the buzzards. Whether all this work happened within Abram’s vision or in real life is left unclear in the text; but in either scenario, the narrative emphasizes Abram’s participation.

Preachers might find a connection here between Abram’s “knowledge” and the ways that God involves us as well in the confirmation of God’s word to us. We do not see God’s promises fulfilled by sitting on our hands. Moving forward in faith provides the context to experience God’s faithfulness.

Doubt and faith coexist in all of us. One of the invitations offered by this enigmatic passage is to resist the paralysis of doubt. Abram follows God’s instructions in the midst of his unknowing. And by following despite his doubts, Abram experiences a tangible reassurance of God’s relational fidelity.

Psalm 27 is one of the most profound prayers in the entire Bible. The depth of the psalmist’s trust in God echoes across the ages, leading James L. Mays to rank it right up there with Psalm 23 for sheer inspirational potential. Mays says that this psalm “teaches what trust is like, and it leads those who follow its lines in liturgy or meditation toward that trust.”¹

We would be doing the psalm an injustice, however, if we did not recognize that it arises out of a context of profound pain. Prayers like this don’t spring out of nowhere, after all. Those who seek to make sense of it would do well to ask, “What brought that on?”

The psalmist’s situation

This psalmist is in serious trouble. Verse 2 refers to “adversaries and foes,” and verse 3 suggests that these are numerous enough to warrant being called an “army.” But the specific nature of the threat doesn’t become clear until verse 12, where the psalmist says, “False witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence.” The intensity of the attack helps us understand the brutality of the metaphor in verse 2, where the psalmist says, “[These] evildoers … devour my flesh.”

Whoever said, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” was either lying or deluded. Not so this psalmist. Words can and do hurt, especially in a society that placed such a high priority on the testimony of witnesses. In the Old Testament context, it took two witnesses to convict (see Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15). However, the story of Naboth (1 Kings 21) illustrates that even that precaution was no guarantee. In that story, Queen Jezebel secures two witnesses to lie, and Naboth loses both his vineyard and his life.

So the stakes are high for the person praying this prayer. It may even be a matter of life and death.

An overview of the psalm

Against that background, then, we are better prepared to appreciate the whole psalm. It falls into three sections:

• Verses 1–6: Statements of trust in God
• Verses 7–12: Petitions for refuge and deliverance
• Verses 13–14: Further statements of trust and encouragement

Let’s look at each section in turn before returning to consider the ways in which the entire psalm speaks for and to us today.

Verses 1–6: The Lord is my light

Given the seriousness of the psalmist’s situation, it’s remarkable that images of light, salvation, and safety dominate these opening verses. This is even more striking when we consider that this psalm is technically a lament—a form that typically begins with a list of complaints. This psalmist simply fast-forwards to expressions of trust and lets God (and us) figure out his complaints from hints along the way.

The one thing the psalmist longs for most is “to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple” (verse 4). This is the “stronghold/refuge” he seeks—a place where lies cannot survive God’s holy gaze. It’s also the place where the psalmist’s expressions of trust can burst forth in full-throated praise (verse 6).

Verses 7–12: Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud

In these verses the psalmist pleads with God for help. “Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud!” he begs (verse 7). Then, as if he fears he has been too bold, he receives a little pep talk from his own heart (verse 8). Thus encouraged, he blurts out his petition (verse 9), which is that God not abandon him.

While verse 12 restates the psalmist’s primary petition, verse 11 asks God, “Teach me your way … and lead me on a level path.” There is a dash of modesty in this prayer that we often forget when begging God to do our bidding. As John L. Bell puts it, we might do well to give up “advising God and instead [ask] that God might reveal what a better way might be.”²

Verses 13–14: Wait for the Lord

Petition turns back to trust at the conclusion of the psalm, although different translations vary as to the intensity of that trust. The New Revised Standard Version’s “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living” (verse 13) gives the impression that the psalmist’s faith is rock-solid. The Jewish Publication Society’s version of the same verse leaves room for what may be a slight wobble. It reads, “Had I not the assurance that I would enjoy the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living …”

Who of us has not had similar moments of hesitation? Perhaps the psalmist’s response to his own unfinished sentence can speak into our uncertainty. “Wait for the LORD,” he counsels. “Be strong and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!” (verse 14).

Seeking truth and comfort in a culture of lies

Even if we are not personally beset by slanderous enemies, the deep trust this psalm teaches is relevant to a culture beset with so much disinformation, propaganda, and lies.

The stakes are high. It may even be a matter of life and death.

One of the most heartening things about this psalm is that faith and confidence do not seem to be contingent on having “arrived” at the place of absolute safety. The “light” of God’s face is reflected in the psalmist’s words throughout the psalm.

Even if doubt occasionally threatens to undo us, the psalmist counsels us to “wait for the LORD.” For isn’t that what faith means? Trusting God even in the midst of fear and uncertainty? As the author of the book of Hebrews put it: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

Notes

1. James L. Mays, Psalms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 130.
2. John L. Bell, Living with the Psalms (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2020), 138.

In this short passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, these verses begin and end with something between an exhortation and a plea.¹

Paul’s letter is written to the small assembly of believers in Philippi, a significant city and proud Roman colony on the main east-west road between Byzantium and Rome. The letter has a thematic unity in spite of a number of abrupt changes of topic: Paul is eager to highlight Jesus’ refusal to cling to any advantages that might have been his as God’s own Son. Jesus gives up the advantages of power to become God’s call—God’s wooing, if you will—of humankind (yet again!). When God exalts Jesus above all others after Jesus’ death on a cross, Jesus’ way of being in and among and for humankind is the light for us of God’s love for us.

Paul sees himself and other evangelists of God’s love in Christ as living in this same way—that of eschewing privilege and power in order to woo others by and for God’s love, not least for each other.

Our passage once again sums up a call to a way of life and an understanding of a Godly life—that is “citizenship in heaven” (Philippians 3:20) that has been repeated and developed throughout the letter.

It begins with a direct description of how these believers might understand themselves—that is, as symmimetai or fellow imitators (New Revised Standard Version: “join in imitating”). The imitation called for is not a matter of Paul’s ego-driven mission and to be readily dismissed. Rather, Paul offers himself and others as those who are not “enemies of the cross,” but find in the cross the true description of how God in Christ has come to serve.

Surely such a God is almost incomprehensible to Paul’s hearers: such a contrast to the gods with which they were familiar in the Greco-Roman world, and in our world as well.

Paul is trying so hard throughout this letter to clarify what “this way” in Philippians 4:1 really means for all followers of Jesus, all those incorporated into his body. There is a present “this way” and a future: these two are connected by process. The key Greek verbs here are in the present tense (see Philippians 3:17 and 4:1). The Philippians are asked to continue behavior and not abandon what it means to “stand firm” (4:1) in Christ—that is, living according to God in Christ (“heavenly citizenship,” 3:20), as Paul and others are trying to do (3:17). “Keep on imitating,” “keep on observing” so that you may continue to live (3:17) not as an enemy of the cross of Christ, but as one “standing firm” in the Christ who himself went to that cross.

It is a powerful passage, offering both a calling that is countercultural for the ancient recipients and perhaps even more so for us. The promise of life for those who have their citizenship in heaven is continued transformation into the body of Christ’s glory (Philippians 3:21). That transformative action is written of in the future tense, beginning, one dares to assume, with incorporation into that body through baptism.

It is really important to say that neither “heavenly citizenship” nor full future transformation refers only to some reality beyond that of earthly life. The Philippians, like Jesus and Paul and others, are to live here on earth as citizens whose constitution (the gospel; see 1:27) comes from God, not from any other gods or emperors. Their lives, transformed by being caught up into the body of Christ, now have different values, different sources of power, different goals than those who are not living that life (see 3:18–19).

It is important to notice how Paul describes the Philippian believers in 4:1. They are those for whom Paul longs. They are his joy. Their existence is Paul’s own crown—he needs no other, itself a countercultural claim that exemplifies the very life in Christ that Paul calls to mind in this letter. The crowns voted by assemblies, the crowns that deck the brow of Roman emperors and other kings, are not the reward treasured by lovers of God.

This letter, so marked by joy (Philippians 1:4, 25; 2:2, 29; 4:1) and affection, helps the Philippians understand that true joy and hope flow from trust in God’s promises, the presence of the transforming Holy Spirit, and a life lived in accordance with the “mind of Christ.” Such joy is corporate rather than individual and is known in lives lived for the well-being of the neighbor rather than a life lived for the sake of one’s own achievement.

Can this be preached in [2025]? The preacher’s imagination will be called upon to help picture for hearers how a life lived with the mind of Christ might shape the relationships so clouded by racism. Or the fears that arise for many of us as we contemplate an influx of refugees whose needs stress the supplies we have in place to maintain a way of life. How can believers not cling to privileges, many earned by hard work and a lot of luck? Can we yield power to those who have so little, trusting that it is God’s way to increase joy in this life and the next? Can we do any of this imaginative action, this creative living without a phony naiveté?

Is it possible to be convinced in [2025] that creation itself needs to be treated with respect and a holding back on our part that allows nature to thrive? I don’t know. We are so shaped by the expectation of consumption, accumulation, preservation of our goods into the future, and self-determination about what we will give and care about, that this ethos, this citizenship that is “worthy of the gospel” (Philippians 1:27) is a radically strange world to imagine. But what an opportunity to remind ourselves of God’s good news as law and gospel!

Notes

1. Commentary published previously on this website for February 21, 2016.